Recently, I began my first semester at Animation Mentor. Animation Mentor is an online animation school taught by professional animators from places like DreamWorks to Pixar. I decided to enroll in this school because I wanted to pursue my passion of becoming a Game Animator and I thought why not let you guys in and how my experience is on this next chapter of my animation career.
Whether you're an aspiring animator like me or just curious about animation, this will be a great post to read! I’ll be splitting this series up into 3 parts so stay tuned for updates along with my regular blog posts in the coming months. Now with that out of the way, let’s get into it!
Part 1: Getting a Good Start
I knew I wanted to work in games, specifically game animation for years now. I hoped getting a degree in Game Design at William Peace University would give me the know how to get out there and create some awesome animations for the next big AAA hit.
However, my college pretty much brushed past animation in my game design course, so I spent the most of 2019 learning animation on my own through YouTube videos, research, and a lot of trial and error. Despite some hard work and creating some cool demo reel pieces during this time, I realized that at the rate I was going it would be a long time before I would get any serious headway in my animation career. So, I decided to give Animation Mentor a try.
I've only just started and I'm already learning so much! This course is shaping my animator mind. I’m understanding how the world acts and reacts and how to use that knowledge to give definition and life to inanimate objects. During just the first 2 weeks, I’ve learned more about animation through Animation Mentor than I have in the last 2 years through self-teaching. Did you know that something as simple as a ball bouncing can convey emotion in animation? I sure didn’t!
It’s definitely been a wakeup call for me. When I enrolled in AM, I thought It would give me that extra push to finally break into the industry. However, I’m realizing there’s so much more to learn and experiment with in the world of animation that would have taken me so much more time to figure out if I were still learning animation on my own.
Another plus side to Animation Mentor, is that I’m building relationships with other aspiring animators like myself. My classmates are all from different walks of life, from different parts of the world. But, one thing we all have in common is a passion for creating some heartfelt stories through our animations. We’re constantly spurring each other one to be better animators in our assignments because we know each and every one of us has something to offer.
This includes my mentor, Eddie Prickett who was one of the 200+ animators who helped create Into the Spiderverse, one of my favorite Spiderman movies of all time. I know, I lucked out right? Eddie’s been a huge resource in developing my animator's eye and I’m glad I get to learn from him!
With a community of new animators learning the ropes and an experienced and knowledgeable mentor along my side, I feel like I already have a stronger foundation for my animation and I’m extremely hopeful to see where this course takes me in these few short months.
What’s your passion? What steps are you taking to get your dream off the ground? Comment below and stayed tuned for part 2 coming soon!
Part 2: The Struggles of Animation
Alright guys! I’m currently on Week 6 of Animation Mentor’s Animation Basics course. It’s hard to believe I’m already at the halfway point in this class!
Let me start off by saying this...animation is hard. Like really freaking hard. This is something that I have said in the past and the more I find myself saying this the more I believe it to be true. Week 3 was a bit of a wake up call for me and not a pleasant one. My assignment was to create a basic bouncing ball. Simple, right? Yea that’s what I thought too until my mentor critiqued my work.
My timing and spacing were all off and it just looked like my ball was gliding from one point on the screen to the next instead of actually bouncing. I thought I had nailed the assignment, but my mentor’s critique and grade on my work told me differently.
I’ll be honest with you guys, after hearing this, I was pretty down in the dumps. I thought with my nearly 2 years of self-taught animation experience I would at least get this exercise down. I kept thinking to myself, if I can’t animate a simple ball bounce right what hope do I have animating something really complex like an intense action scene or an intricate fighting animation for a game later on down the road?
I was kinda upset for a couple days, but I told myself failure was just part of the journey and decided to learn from my failures rather than wallow in them. So, I devoted more time to my animation, signed up for some AM tutoring sessions, played some epic anime music for motivation, and got to animating!
I resubmitted my assignment the following week and it was 10x better than what I had before. Since then, my animation has been improving more and more and I love it! Animation hasn’t gotten any easier during this time, but man is it not rewarding. If I can find pleasure in improving something as basic as a ball bounce, I can only imagine the feeling of finally polishing that winner demo reel piece or working tirelessly for years to create a fully fleshed out animated film!
For those of you like me who are just starting out at AM and are struggling a bit, here’s a little bit of advice.
1.) Sign up for Tutoring: Like I said before, animation is hard and you’ll find yourself struggling a lot at times. If you can’t wrap your mind around a principle and are having a hard time, sign up for Tutoring. It’s easy, free, and it will help you out tremendously. I was hesitant about signing up myself because I didn’t want to believe I needed it, but there’s really nothing wrong with needing a little extra help. Plus, if you’re serious about being an animator you should jump on every opportunity to get better at your craft.
2.) Embrace the Failure: Failure is something that I’ve learned comes with animation. You’re never going to get your character moving perfectly on the first try. In fact, it’s probably going to look choppy and gross, but you can’t throw your hands up in the air or wallow in your lack of animation prowess and quit.
It’s easy to do that, I know, but nothing good ever came about without failure. So, learn from your failures. Analyze each frame to see what’s missing, get feedback from your fellow students and professionals, start from scratch if you have to. Even the greatest animators sucked starting out and you will too. You just gotta keep going and slowly but surely things will start to click and you’ll be reminded why you feel in love with animation in the first place.
Part 3: Semester Reflections
Ohh man guys! I just finished up my first semester at Animation Mentor and I am relieved and excited. I’ll be real with you guys, there were some times when I thought I wasn’t going to make it, but I managed to pull through!
This semester seemed to fly by, but I feel like I’ve learned a ton during my time at AM. I knew about the principles of animation, like Squash and stretch, and Overlapping Action, before, but it wasn’t until I went through AM’s Basics course that I was able to understand and really apply these principles to my animations.
Not only was I able to learn and improve a lot in my animations, but I’ve also learned a few things about the process of animating and some good tidbits about the industry.
One big thing I learned first-hand is that animation is a very difficult, but rewarding medium to practice in. I mentioned in Part 2 of this series that animation was hard when I was trying to figure out the timing and spacing of a bouncing ball. Well it only gets harder from there when you’re working on overlapping tails and personality walks, let me tell ya.
Sometimes I just wanted to throw my hands up in the air and walk away because animating was so hard. I wanted my animation to behave a certain way, but I lacked the know how and skills to bring it together. And when I thought it did all come together my mentor’s critiques proved to me that there was still work that could be done.
I won’t lie, it was an incredibly frustrating experience. However, when I got frustrated or wanted to throw my hands up in the air and give up, I would always ask myself “what do I want?” Do I want to simply walk away or do I want to get better and be the best animator I can be?
Every time, I would say I want to get better because I knew deep down that I could get better. So, I brushed myself off and continued to try and try again, pouring hours into my creations to make them better and better. At the end, I managed to whip up a not too shabby demo reel! My animations still kinda look like crap to me, but when I look back on them, I see the huge amount of progress I’ve made in these past 12 weeks and I become just a little bit more confident to take on the next challenge.
So, I suppose the big takeaway from this spiel is that animation requires you to fail and try again, again, and again some more to really develop your craft. You can’t let a few stumbles or failures get in the way of making awesome animations because that’s what animation and pretty much any kind of art form is about.
You try new things until you find something that works and you run with it. You push yourself not to shy away from challenging or uncharted territories. Instead, you boldly go forward knowing you’re not going to get it the first, second, or 10th time around, but that you’ll eventually find what you’re looking for and it will look freaking awesome in the end. I really do appreciate my time at AM and feel like I worked hard and am excited to learn about Body Mechanics next semester.
There is one thing that I would do differently if I went back and did the Basics course again and that is to give more feedback on other student’s work. I didn’t give a whole lot of feedback on other students' projects this semester. In fact, I probably only gave 3 or 4 comments on the AM campus site during the whole 12 weeks I was there.
Part of that was due to my work schedule. Since I work the night shift, I would get most of my animation work done near the end of the week, so I there wasn’t a lot of time for me to pursue other people’s work.
But, if I’m going to be honest with you, the bigger reason is that I was self-conscious about my animations. I always felt like my assignments weren’t good enough compared to other classmates, so I would intentionally not look too much at the campus site feed to aspire myself from my insecurities.
And this isn’t a good habit to have for two main reasons. One, I can’t develop my animator’s eye when I intentionally blind myself to other’s work. The whole reason AM has a feed built into their campus site is so that when we give feedback to others we can develop our eye to catch things that work and don’t work well in these animations, which helps us fine tune our own animations.
So, when I choose not to look at my fellow classmates’ work and give feedback, I’m essentially choosing not to get better at my animation. And, if I’m not working to get better at my animation then what’s the point?
I’d hate to go through the entire AM course just to come out making mediocre animations all because I was too self conscious about my work. That would just be a complete and utter waste of my time and talents.
Not only would I be depriving myself by doing this, I would also be short-changing other students who could really use feedback on their work. I’ve learned that the best way to grow in this field is to surround yourself in community and continuously build each other up. We have to both give and receive feedback on our work if we ever hope to be the best that we can be and that doesn’t work unless we actually get involved in said community.
So, for this next semester, I’m going to challenge myself to comment on at least one person’s assignment each week. I would also extend this challenge to you guys as well. Whether you’re a newbie like me or a veteran with years of experience, feedback is incredibly important and we should strive ourselves to put the same amount of effort in supporting one another as we do in developing our own work.
That about wraps it up for the Basics, but don’t worry I'm looking to continue this series in future courses!
How was this semester for you? Is there anything you wish you did differently?
Comment below and I’ll see you next semester!
P.S. Check out my Demo Reel below!
Dean Willms
Gamer. Designer. Friend
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